This past spring a number of tech companies took steps to crack down on so-called revenge porn – the posting of nude photos or videos online without the consent of the subject. Today, Google announced it was joining those sites by honoring requests to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without the featured person’s permission from search results.

Google announced in a blog post Friday that it has created a “narrow and limited policy” that will treat the photos and videos in the same manner it treats other sensitive personal information, such as bank account numbers and signatures, that may appear in search results.

“Our philosophy has always been that Search should reflect the whole web,” Amit Singhal, the company’s vice president for search, said in the blog post. “But revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims— predominantly women.”

The company plans to accept requests for removal via a web form that will be available in coming weeks.

“We know this won’t solve the problem of revenge porn – we aren’t able, of course, to remove these images from the websites themselves – but we hope that honoring people’s requests to remove such imagery from our search results can help,” Singhal writes.

Some victims of revenge porn have been able to have images delisted from Google Search my making copyright claims on the images. But if the victim isn’t the copyright holder of a revealing photo — say it was taken by an ex or a friend — this method falls short. Google’s new policy may close such loopholes that allowed these search results to remain.

Revenge porn is an issue many social-based sites have been dealing with in recent years.

In March, Twitter outlawed revenge porn through new terms of service. Just days before that, Reddit banned revenge porn with an update to its privacy policy that prohibits the posting of nude and sexual images without the consent of the subject.

Additionally, sites that existed solely to publish such content have come under fire from lawmakers and federal regulators.

In January, the operator of one now-defunct site dedicated to revenge porn called “isanybodydown.com” was the focus of a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission, which alleges he used deception to acquire nude content to post online, among other things.

He settled with the FTC and was ordered to destroy all images and personal contact information he collected from victims and people who knew them.

Shortly after that case, in February, the operator of a similar venture called yougotposted.com was found guilty of identity theft and extortion for running the site, which included thousands of sexually explicit images, mostly of women, that were published by anonymous users without the subjects’ consent or knowledge. He’s facing up to 20 years in jail as a result.

“Revenge porn” and Search [Google Blog]

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